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Nepali Ambassador to Pakistan Tapas Adhikari held a meeting with General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, at the latter's office in Rawalpindi on Tuesday.

During the meeting, the duo discussed matters related to mutual interest and measures to improve the bilateral ties between the two countries, according to Nepali Embassy in Islamabad.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has revoked a state of emergency after dozens of MPs walked out of the ruling coalition, which has been struggling to quell protests over economic downturn, Aljazeera reported.

In another setback for the administration on Tuesday, Finance Minister Ali Sabry resigned a day after his appointment and ahead of crucial talks scheduled with the International Monetary Fund for a loan programme.

Rajapaksa dissolved his Cabinet on Monday and sought to form a unity government as public unrest surged over the ruling family’s handling of the debt-heavy economy that has led to shortages of food, medicine and fuel and prolonged power cuts.

In a gazette issued late on Tuesday, Rajapaksa revoked the emergency rule ordinance that went into effect last Friday.

Sabry said in his resignation letter to the president that he believed he had “acted in the best interests of the country”.

“At this crucial juncture the country needs stability to weather the current financial crisis and difficulties,” he said in the letter seen by the news agency Reuters, also offering to resign from his seat in the Parliament of Sri Lanka if the president wanted to bring in someone from outside to replace him, according to Aljazeera.

Street demonstrations against the food and fuel shortages, triggered by a lack of foreign exchange for imports, began last month but have intensified in recent days, leading to clashes between protesters and police in some instances.

Dozens of protesters peacefully gathered near the residence of the prime minister on Tuesday, Aljazeera reported.

More than 40 MPs have left Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's coalition government, BBC reported.

MPs from parties aligned with Mr Rajapaksa's Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) led coalition said they would now independently represent themselves.

The move comes as the South Asian nation is grappling with power cuts and shortages because of an economic and foreign exchange crisis.

This has led to mass protests demanding Mr Rajapaksa's resignation.

It is unclear what the implications of the MPs' actions are at this point. They have distanced themselves from the government, but have not extended support to the opposition. 

It could, however, call into question the prime minister's authority over the parliament. 

Mr Rajapaksa's cabinet has already resigned, but both the president and his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, have so far refused to step down.

Instead, the president called on opposition parties to help him form a national government and accept cabinet portfolios, according to BBC.

They have all refused and have reiterated demands for him to resign. 

"What the people want is for this president and the entire government to step down," said Sajith Premadasa, leader of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya, Sri Lanka's main opposition alliance.

On Tuesday, a freshly appointed finance minister also announced he was quitting the job, less than 24 hours after accepting the post.

Ali Sabry, a close ally of President Rajapaksa, said he would give up his parliament seat for someone outside politics who might be "suitable to handle the situation".

Meanwhile, anti-government protests continued on Tuesday in major cities across the country, BBC reported.

"People can't afford their daily rice, their dhal, their basic necessities. People can't get on buses to come to work, to go to school," one protester told the BBC.

"How much worse can it get? There's no petrol, there's no diesel, kids can't sit their exams because there's no paper," said another.

In the past days, demonstrations calling for the resignation of the president have picked up momentum.

Protesters even defied a curfew meant to last from Friday to Sunday in order to halt a planned day of protests, after a demonstration outside the president's house on Thursday night turned violent. 

The demonstrations mark a massive turnaround in popularity for Mr Rajapaksa, who swept into power with a majority win in 2019, promising stability and a "strong hand" to rule the country.

Sri Lanka is now struggling to pay for imports of fuel and other goods because of a shortage of foreign exchange, which has exacerbated its worst economic crisis since independence from the UK in 1948.

The country needs foreign currency to pay for imports of fuel, according to BBC.

"There are endless shortages of essentials, including fuel and cooking gas. Hospitals are on the verge of closing because there are no medicines," Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka's former president and leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party that withdrew its support for Mr Rajapaksa's coalition, told parliament. 

"At such a time, our party is on the side of the people."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of gruesome atrocities in Ukraine and told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that those responsible should immediately be brought up on war crimes charges in front of a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg after World War II, Associated Press reported.

Over the past few days, grisly images of what appeared to be intentional killings of civilians carried out by Russian forces in Bucha and other towns before they withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv have caused a global outcry and led Western nations to expel scores of Moscow’s diplomats and propose further sanctions, including a ban on coal imports from Russia.

Zelenskyy, speaking via video from Ukraine to U.N. diplomats, said that civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.

“They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children,” he said. He asserted that people’s tongues were pulled out “only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.”

Zelenskyy said that both those who carried out the killings and those who gave the orders “must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes” in front of a tribunal similar to what was used in postwar Germany.

Moscow’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said that while Bucha was under Russian control, “not a single local person has suffered from any violent action.” Reiterating what the Kremlin has contended for days, he said that video footage of bodies in the streets was “a crude forgery” staged by the Ukrainians, according to the Associated Press.

“You only saw what they showed you,” he said. “The only ones who would fall for this are Western dilettantes.”

As Zelenskyy spoke to the diplomats, survivors of the monthlong Russian occupation took investigators to body after body of townspeople allegedly shot down by troops. Others simply surveyed the destruction.

In Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, 25-year-old, Dmitriy Yevtushkov searched the rubble of apartment buildings and found that only a photo album remained from his family’s home. In the besieged southern city of Mykolaiv, a passerby stopped briefly to look at the bright blossoms of a shattered flower stand lying among bloodstains, the legacy of a Russian shell that killed nine. The onlooker sketched out the sign of the cross in the air, and moved on.

Associated Press journalists in Bucha have counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities. Also, high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for weeks, during the time that Russian forces were in the town.

The dead in Bucha included a pile of six charred bodies, as witnessed by AP journalists. It was not clear who they were or under what circumstances they died. One body was probably that of a child, said Andrii Nebytov, head of police in the Kyiv region. A gunshot wound to the head was visible on one, Associated Presa reported.

The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court at The Hague opened an investigation a month ago into possible war crimes in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy stressed that Bucha was only one place and that there are more with similar horrors — a warning echoed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Stoltenberg, meanwhile, warned that in pulling back from the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military is regrouping its forces in order to deploy them to eastern and southern Ukraine for a “crucial phase of the war.” Russia’s stated goal currently is control of the Donbas, the largely Russian-speaking industrial region in the east that includes the shattered port city of Mariupol, according to the Associated Press.